


Good Riddance

by Sohotthateveryonedied



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: Under the Red Hood (2010), DCU (Comics), Red Hood: Lost Days
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Cemetery, Daddy Issues, Gen, Introspection, Jason Todd Has Daddy Issues, Jason Todd Has Issues, Jason Todd Needs A Hug, Past Character Death, Resurrection, Smoking, and vice versa, but deep down he still loves his dad, jason and bruce have problems, jason visits his grave after returning to gotham whoopsie, prepare for angst guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:42:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27963230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sohotthateveryonedied/pseuds/Sohotthateveryonedied
Summary: Here Lies Jason Todd, Beloved Son.Jason kneels and brushes dried leaves off the stone, sweeping it clean with his gloved hand. He’s surprised to see that, other than the leaves, his grave is in pristine shape. It might as well have been erected last week instead of almost four years ago. Someone has been keeping up on it—most likely the same someone who left the vase of white chrysanthemums, barely wilted.
Relationships: Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 7
Kudos: 178





	Good Riddance

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to my good friend Kon for the prompt!!! ❤❤❤
> 
> Title is from "Good Riddance" from Hades, which I'd never listened to until Kon sent me a link and now I can't stop listening to it whoops.

Jason’s nose is bleeding.  
  
Not to say that he has it any worse than the other guy. Quite the opposite, really. To make it out of a brief but vehement pub brawl with all thirty-two teeth intact and not a single bone broken is a miracle in the eyes of anyone who wasn’t conditioned into a child soldier by a bastard in a cape.  
  
“Jesus,” a bystander chokes. He looks down at the unconscious mouth-breather on the pub’s dirty floor, blood dripping from his temple where Jason knocked him out with a beer bottle. He’ll be fine with a few stitches. Jason could have done worse. Far worse. “What’d he ever do to you?”  
  
Jason ignores the curdling of his brain matter and the ache in his hand to reach over the bar and grab the shot of tequila he ordered before things got messy. He downs it, savoring the burn. The pain in his nose is a dull throb at the back of his mind as the alcohol warms his system, sending his chugging mind to a pleasant crawl.  
  
_“You ask me, someone should kill that Bat fucker. Put a bullet through his brain and be done wit’ it.”_  
  
Jason wipes his mouth on his sleeve, catching some blood in the process. “When he wakes up, tell ‘im I said he’s lucky I didn’t shatter something important.” Jason slams the shot glass back on the counter, pushing it toward the stunned bartender. All eyes are on Jason—the blood on his knuckles, on his lips, sticking to the white streak in his hair.  
  
He throws a few crumpled fifties on the counter. It’ll be more than enough to compensate for the shattered glassware and cracked barstool. If the League of Assassins has a problem with him using the funds Talia wires him to cover his own ass in addition to his little revenge mission, no one has killed him over it yet. He tugs up the hood of his sweatshirt and pushes past the clustered onlookers, charting a path to the door.   
  
Let them stare. It’s not like his face will be jogging any memories.  
  
The air outside the bar is gelid and chaps whatever skin it can reach. Jason stuffs his hands in his pockets and trudges down the cracked sidewalk. Half of the street lamps on this block are busted, but Jason doesn’t need to see where he’s going. He’s gone down this very path multiple times in the past week, making it daringly close to his destination before chickening out and turning back at the last minute.  
  
Isn’t that worth a laugh? Robin could stare down supervillains twice his size without flinching, but now that he’s taller, broader, tougher, he runs away from a dirty cemetery with his tail between his legs.  
  
That’s what the bar was for: liquid courage to brave the ghosts that lurk not in the cemetery, but in the remnants of Jason’s own soul. And instead, he punched out a stranger for a comment that countless Gothamites have made before. Hell, _Jason_ said the same thing back when his name might as well have been “That Homeless Kid On the Corner of Seventh and West Avenue.” Back before he knew the truth.  
  
A wrought fence rises in the distance ahead of him, black metal glinting in the neon shine from a deli across the street. A sign blurs into focus against the black night, like an omen.  
  
_Gotham City Cemetery._  
  
Jason shivers, but not from the cold. He forces his legs to keep moving, forces himself to cross the threshold into the cemetery. The gate creaks behind him. He makes his way across the grass, glistening with frost and half-dead like it’s chasing the lifeless shells under the surface. The graveyard is empty, but Jason still feels eyes on his back as he walks down the aisles toward the plot he came here for.  
  
As his boots crunch over dead leaves and flatten the grass between graves, Jason listens. He listens to the wind as it slips between tree branches and makes them whistle. He listens to the distant howls of coyotes, secluded in the woods. And, beneath it all, Jason listens for the muffled cries of someone six feet under, struggling to scrape their way to freedom. Just to check. Just to be sure.  
  
Finally, he stops at a headstone.  
  
_Here Lies Jason Todd, Beloved Son._  
  
Jason kneels and brushes dried leaves off the stone, sweeping it clean with his gloved hand. He’s surprised to see that, other than the leaves, his grave is in pristine shape. It might as well have been erected last week instead of almost four years ago. Someone has been keeping up on it—most likely the same someone who left the vase of white chrysanthemums, barely wilted.  
  
How often do the others visit? How often do their tears water the dying grass now lodged in the soles of Jason’s boots? How often do they come here to mourn the boy they lost, wishing desperately to turn back time and bring him back?  
  
Jason stands, his knee clicking with the motion. Aches and pains, they rattle and demand attention he can’t give. He crams his hands in his pockets, looking down at the headstone, his name inscribed in blocky letters.  
  
“You were better off dead, kid.”  
  
And isn’t that true? Death is peace. It may have been the only peace Jason had ever had in his life, pre- _and_ post-Joker. His childhood was a godforsaken nightmare long before the crowbar came into play. Picking pockets because Dad insisted that children needed to _earn_ their keep—which, in Willis’ eyes, meant stealing money so Dad could buy more beer and lotto tickets. Ah, parenting.  
  
Then it was months, _years_ living in Crime Alley with no shelter but rusty dumpsters and the occasional cardboard box that hadn’t already been claimed by someone else in the territory. It was stealing hub caps to sell for cash, and when that stopped being enough, he sold his body too. It was winters spent huddled next to restaurant entrances, hoping to catch some of the heat that bled from within, praying to an entity he didn’t believe in that he could make it to March without losing a finger from frostbite.  
  
Wayne Manor was a haven—one that Jason thought only came to fictional orphans and the few kids lucky enough to be sold to a bidder who wanted a permanent prize rather than a nightly one. Wayne Manor wasn’t anything like those places. It was salvation, protection from the unforgiving world that lurked outside its vast acres.  
  
Then, foolishly, Jason volunteered to be thrown right back into the frothing maw of Gotham City—but this time he flew high, high above the very same streets he used to suffer in. This time, however, he had a hero by his side.  
  
Jason spent the following years packing the emotions he didn’t know how to word into punches, kicks, opponents knocked clean across the room. It was sullen silences and kicking over training dummies solely because the vocabulary to describe what he was feeling refused to come. Jason had read Austen, Brontë, Huxley, and Stoker, yet he didn’t know how to confess to his hero that Jason Todd was too broken to be salvaged and he should save himself the effort of trying.  
  
Then there was Joker. Then pain, then blood, then heat so encompassing that Jason could smell his own charred flesh and singed hair. He felt his lungs filling with smoke, the poison packed into every space it could find and choking him, suffocating him, making the fire around him blur until it whited out completely.  
  
After that? There was only peace.  
  
Jason doesn’t remember much of death except that, for the first time in his short existence, he was weightless. He could probably conjure all sorts of metaphors to try and convey what it was like being dead, but he has nothing to compare it to. No amount of poetry could describe what it felt like to be nonexistent and infinite at the same time.  
  
Now, by miracle or curse, Jason Todd is back. Alive. He’s back in Gotham not to reunite with his loved ones like any sane person would after being resurrected, but to take revenge on _him_ for being too much of a coward to do what needs to be done. For failing to avenge his partner, his soldier, his _child._  
  
Jason was _dead._ He was a rotting corpse in the ground, and his so-called father refused to do anything about it. He didn’t even _try._ He let Jason’s death go unavenged as if Jason didn’t matter to him at all, which is absolute bullshit because Jason knows how much he cares. He _knows_ how fucking loved he is, and yet here he is, standing in front of his own fucking _grave_ while a madman walks around on the surface with Jason’s blood on his hands, perfectly fine. Committing _more_ atrocities, taking _more_ children from their parents.  
  
It isn’t fair.   
  
“You deserved better,” Jason says through numb lips. His hands are curled tight in his pockets. If he weren’t wearing gloves, his nails might pop right through the skin. “You deserved better than the bare fucking minimum, which is what you got. The bare minimum. You barely even had time to live before it was taken away.”  
  
It might be silly to talk to an empty grave, but it doesn’t _feel_ empty. Even if Jason’s body is walking and talking, part of him is still dead. The good parts of himself remain six feet below the surface, unreachable. His innocence. His faith in good guys to stop bad guys.  
  
Maybe it was childhood foolishness. Maybe adulthood is realizing the truth: that perhaps what the world needed all along is bad guys to take out the worse guys, while the _real_ good guys stick to saving kittens from trees and keeping their hands clean. Maybe Jason is just bad enough to do the job.  
  
“I’m sorry he failed you. Us. But I’ll...I’ll make it right. I’ll make sure you get the justice you deserve.” He will if it kills him. Again.  
  
Leaves crunch a distance behind him in warning; it’s the only reason Jason doesn’t jump and pull a gun when a crotchety voice behind him says, “Visiting hours are over in fifteen minutes. Fine for trespassing is fifty bucks after the gates close.” It’s an old man with a ratty coat and rattier knit hat, no doubt the groundskeeper of this place.   
  
Jason looks back at his grave. “That’s okay. I was done, anyway.”  
  
He wants to ask about what happened here on that night when death itself was reversed. When a young boy crawled to the surface and stumbled off with brains made of swiss cheese. Who noticed that the ground had been dug up in the morning? Who hastily filled the hole, not wanting to ruffle Wayne’s feathers by delivering the news that his child’s grave had been robbed overnight?  
  
The man reads the inscription over Jason’s shoulder, the dates etched on the stone. He sighs. “It’s never easy when it’s a kid, is it?”  
  
“No, it isn’t.”  
  
“I’m sorry for your loss.”  
  
Jason shrugs. “He’s better now. God knows life never did him any favors.”  
  
“It never does in Gotham.” The man shivers, pulling up the collar of his coat. “Close the gate when you leave, will ya? Can’t have any more teenagers vandalizing the place after dark.” He walks off, muttering to himself about frostbite.  
  
Jason only barely restrains himself from calling out to ask if a tall man with black hair and blue eyes visits this spot often—if he stands at the grave and weeps alone, without anyone but the trees to bear witness. But Jason doesn’t need to ask; he already knows the answer.   
  
Teeth chattering, Jason digs around in his pocket for a pack of Marlboros. He sticks a cigarette between his teeth and lights it, the initial blaze lighting up the words on the headstone so they turn haunting, as if beckoning him to return to his resting place, _daring_ him to accept where he truly belongs.  
  
When the cig has been burned down to the filter, Jason drops it and grinds it down with his heel, directly over where his coffin sits deep within the soil. Maybe the next person to visit will wonder about whose discarded cigarette this is, lying in the grass over a dead kid’s grave. Maybe it will be glared at and thrown away in an effort to keep the ground untarnished, just as it should be to respect the boy who died in a battle he shouldn’t have been fighting in the first place.   
  
Jason lets out a breath, the last dregs of smoke lifting on the air and dispersing high above his head, spreading into the dark sky.  
  
“Sleep tight, kiddo.”  
  


**Author's Note:**

> [Feel free to mosey on down to my Tumblr!](http://sohotthateveryonedied.tumblr.com/)


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